Wimmin, Wimps & Wallflowers: an Encyclopaedic Dictionary of Gender and Sexual Orientation Bias in the United States.

Edited by Philip H. Herbst. Yarmouth, ME: Intercultural Press, 2001, 322 pages. Cloth, $39.95.

   The Real Dictionary will give all words that exist in use, the bad words as
   well as any.... These words ought to be collected--the bad words as well as
   the good.--Many of these bad words are fine. -- Walt Whitman (1904, pp.
   6-7)

   The ever-present fascination with slang ... continues to spawn so-called
   slang dictionaries, mostly idiosyncratically selected helter-skelter
   glossaries decidedly NOT based ... on time-honored principles of
   lexicography.--Thomas Nunnally (2001, p. 168)

There are at least six types--or domains--of sexual language: medico-scientific, standard, slang, euphemistic, intimate, erotic, and insulting (Cornog, 1994; Perper, 1995). In medico-scientific terms, "Tom Smith has an erectile dysfunction," while in standard speech, he "has trouble getting an erection." In slang, he "can't get it up" or "is stuck in neutral." Euphemistically, he "can't do his husbandly (or marital) duty." More intimately to his wife, Tom might grumble, humorously, that "Junior is taking a nap." In the cliches of erotic fiction, "Tom's manhood shied away from Cynthia's pleading eagerness."

Insultingly, Tom Smith is simply a limp-dick, one of the 1,100 words and expressions described in Wimmin, Wimps & Wallflowers. Herbst's first book, The Color of Words (1997), described labels for racial and ethnic groups, and now he has taken on gender and sexual orientation: "These terms and expressions shed light on how our lives are shaped by learned ideas of gender and sexual orientation; in particular, how words are used to put some groups down and privilege others" (p. xiii).

Several kinds of words predominate: slurs and insults like limp-dick, faggot, and slut; more neutral words like girl and honey that in certain contexts can be condescending or disparaging; terms like transgender and she-male that are hotly debated or used in different ways by different groups; and words like herstory, homophobia, sex object, and looksism, meant to throw light on how gender and sexual orientation have been disparaged. The entries include a definition/commentary (often lengthy--faggot and girl run to over a page each), sometimes examples of usage from literature and the media, sometimes etymology, and cross-references to related words.

Many entries refer to stigmatized groups like women and gender nonconformists. However, quite a number refer to men in general and to heterosexuals, for example: hunk, schmuck, caveman, geezer, old goat, bugfucker, jack-off, breeder--and toyboy. Other words represent "in-group" disparagements of other members of the same group, like crunchie and lipstick for types of lesbians.

Herbst points out how some of the insulting words have been reclaimed within a target group, such as queer, butch, dyke, and girl (especially in girl-power and as grrlz and similar spellings). Faggot too has been reclaimed as the title of a well-known gay novel by Larry Kramer (1989). However, such words can be "reclaimed" only by speakers within the stigmatized group. On the lips of a heterosexual, words like faggot and queer win no friends!

Herbst has clearly put a great deal of work and heart into his book. However, it is not truly a dictionary. Indeed, it is more a work of hopeful multicultural idealism than a dictionary in the lexicographer's sense. Etymologies, all the various meanings of each entry, and examples with citations are not always present and may not be consistent with other scholarship. For example, he argues that the word cunt is etymologically (and flatteringly) related to the word cunning (p. 63), but the Oxford English Dictionary (Compact OED, 1989) derives cunning from Middle English cunnen, meaning "knowledge," and by contrast derives cunt from Middle English cunte, cognate with similar Germanic and Scandinavian forms. Francoeur, Cornog, Perper, and Scherzer (1995, pp. 721-722) conjecture that cunt is historically linked to Gothic qens/qenth, and perhaps to a Proto-Indo-European root *gwen-, meaning "female human being." (The asterisk indicates a hypothetical form.) Other possibilities are cuneus, meaning wedge in Latin (Lowry, 1976) and the Arabic khunt, meaning "femininity" but also the name of a beautiful woman in a poem by Harun Ar-Rachid from the 8th century (Mernissi, 2001, p. 136). However, Herbst cites neither the OED entry for cunt nor the Francoeur et al. dictionary.

Herbst also does not explain the principles whereby he includes or excludes meanings. Meanings that do not fit specifically into gender or sexual orientation areas are usually omitted. For example, horse is missing its meaning of "heroin"; half-and-half is not glossed as also referring to a favorite sex act among clients of prostitutes. However, head, glossed first as sometimes referring to sexually available women, is also glossed in passing--and misleadingly--as simply "sexual gratification" with no mention of its usual referent, oral sex. In short, "time-honored principles of lexicography" are not followed. Instead, Wimmin, Wimps & Wallflowers appears to be a sort of lexicon-via-essay of Herbst's personal--and perhaps helter-skelter--pick among terms that he believes either derogate or point to reformed attitudes relating to women, men, and sexual minorities. Herbst's heart may be in the right place about words that hurt people, but a scholar of sexual language he is not.

So what's the point? Most speakers of English know much of what Herbst has compiled. The point appears, then, not so much to define as to gather a body of words together as an exercise in sensitivity training and to air his views about them. Still, what now? Is Herbst trying to say that these words should not be used? Samuel Johnson, the great lexicographer of English, wanted to cleanse the language but gave it up as fruitless: "[M]ay the lexicographer be derided who ... shall imagine that his dictionary can embalm his language, and secure it from corruption and decay" (quoted in Green, 1996, pp. 268-269). Today, we laugh at Thomas Bowdler and his sanitized Shakespeare--even at Noah Webster, who considered his own "Bowdlerized" edition of the Bible a greater achievement than his dictionary of American English (Perrin, 1992). Nunnally's (2001) review of several slang dictionaries stresses that slang tends to resist dictionary-makers and language purifiers.

Herbst does not seem to be as interested in mandating politically correct diction as in helping us "face our prejudices.... A main aim of this book is to make more visible some of the attitudes and inequities in our relationships that are so easily distorted ignored, denied, or dismissed as relics of some unprogressive past" (p. xvii). He warns:

   Certain commentary will strike some readers as more political and moral
   than exacting and scientific. For this I offer no apology. Those dictionary
   makers who mask the political agenda of dominant groups behind pretensions
   of "lexicography" do us no favor. (pp. xix-xx)

In this, Herbst's wordbook recalls Kramarae and Treichler's A Feminist Dictionary (1985), which, Green says,

   ... fails as a lexicographic work. [B]ut those standards [by which it
   fails] are indisputably "male standards," restricting lexicography to the
   world of "patriarchal authoritarianism." Thus, as its editors point out,
   using "a flexible format is a conscious effort to honor the words and
   arguments of women, to liberate our thinking about what can be said about
   language and to guard against lexicographic ownership of words and
   definitions." They want quite specifically to produce something that is not
   the traditional "dick-tionary." (1996, pp. 464-465)

So how might JSR readers benefit from Wimmin, Wimps & Wallflowers? For starters, it is a gold mine of examples for anyone teaching a course on sex and gender. Do the students agree with the definitions? Why or why not? Is it really true, as the terms included seem to suggest, that insults for women mostly mm on their sexuality while insults for men turn on stupidity or ineptness? What new expressions have students heard that fit these patterns or--more interestingly--do not?

Another use is inspiration for research projects. Herbst, being male, has probably overlooked some ways women use and perceive these kinds of words. For example, he says about studmuffin only that it is a man "known for his sexual appeal." That's probably true as far as it goes, but our take on studmuffin is that it is used mainly by women, and as a compliment. An interesting project would be to elicit terms used by women to refer to men, including definitions and usage examples.

Walt Whitman wrote that bad words should be collected in dictionaries. He was writing in the 1800s, when "bad" words--especially words about sex--were most definitely not included in dictionaries. From Samuel Johnson's groundbreaking dictionary of 1755 through numerous Webster dictionaries from 1828 up to 1973, no mainstream English dictionary included fuck (Cornog, 1991). More recently, several dictionaries have concentrated on sexual language (Francoeur et al., 1995; Goldenson & Anderson, 1986; Richter, 1993). Even if not exactly a dictionary, Herbst's Wimmin, Wimps & Wallflowers, by documenting perceived language bias at one point in time, does increase our understanding of how words reflect and influence our sexual culture.

REFERENCES

The compact Oxford English dictionary (2nd ed.). (1989). Oxford, UK: Clarendon.

Cornog, M. (1991, April). Sodomy, pornography, and Humpty Dumpty: Some remarks on the history of sexual lexicography. Paper presented at the annual conference of the Eastern Region of the Society for the Scientific Study of Sex, Philadelphia, PA.

Cornog, M. (1994). Language and sex. In V. L. Bullough & B. Bullough (Eds.), Human sexuality: An encyclopedia (pp. 341-347). New York: Garland.

Francoeur, R. T., Cornog, M., Perper, T., & Scherzer, N. A. (Eds.). (1995). The complete dictionary of sexology (New ed.). New York: Continuum.

Goldenson, R. M., & Anderson, K. N. (1986). The language of sex from A to Z. New York: World Almanac.

Green, J. (1996). Chasing the sun: Dictionary makers and the dictionaries they made. New York: Holt.

Herbst, P. H. (1997). The color of words. Yarmouth, ME: Intercultural Press.

Kramer, L. (1989). Faggots. New York: New American Library.

Lowry, T. P. (1976). Some notes on the etymology of the word "clitoris." In T. P. Lowry & T S. Lowry (Eds.), The clitoris (pp. 162-182). St. Louis, MO: Warren H. Green.

Mernissi, F. (2001). Scheherazade goes west: Different cultures, different harems. New York: Washington Square Press.

Nunnally, T. E. (2001). Glossing the folk: A review of selected lexical research into American slang and Americanisms. American Speech, 76, 158-176.

Perper, T. (1995). Introduction. In R. T. Francoeur, M. Cornog, T Perper, & N. A. Scherzer, The complete dictionary of sexology (New ed., pp. vii-x). New York: Continuum.

Perrin, N. (1992). Dr. Bowdler's legacy: A history of expurgated books in England and America. Boston: David R. Godine.

Richter, A. (1993). Dictionary of sexual slang: Words, phrases, and idioms from AC/DC to zig-zig. New York: Wiley.

Whitman, W. (1904). An American primer. Boston: Small, Maynard & Company.

Reviewed by Martha Cornog, M.A., M.S., and Timothy Perper, Ph.D., 717 Pemberton Street, Philadelphia, PA 19147; e-mail: [e-mail].